@CafeHayek highlights a paper by our much lamented Dr Fauci which may give more insights into the state of mind that is driving him to shut down our modern economy than it does about virology @boriquagato @ElonBachman https://cafehayek.com/2020/10/expert-failure-to-know.html

A few choice quotes: "This realization leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergences."

Wut? Can anyone with any knowledge of history really write this?

How can any thinking person, much less a virologist, fetishize the 17th century over the 21st? I understand that a modern economy with cheap international travel spreads disease faster than in the past, but if you look at the net effect of modernity on disease it's not even close

"Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction?"

Hmm. I have joked that the lockdowners are trying to send us back to the Middle Ages but I never suspected it might be literally true

"There is nothing new about this situation, except that we now live in a human-dominated world in which our increasingly extreme alterations of the environment induce increasingly extreme backlashes from nature"

Who knew Fauci was a Gaia worshiper? This is pure mysticism

Mysticism doesn't mix with science. Describing outcomes of natural processes with anthropomorphic terms like "backlash" is a marker that this isn't science, it's pagan religion dressed up as science, no different from fundamentalists trying to prove the Earth is 4000 yrs old.

"Evidence suggests that SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 are only the latest examples of a deadly barrage of coming coronavirus and other emergences. "

This is a plea for continued status and power for Dr Fauci. No person put in power to solve a problem ever admits the problem is solved

"The COVID-19 pandemic is yet another reminder... that in a human-dominated world, in which our human activities represent aggressive, damaging, and unbalanced interactions with nature, we will increasingly provoke new disease emergences."

Is Fauci a primitivist?

"We remain at risk for the foreseeable future. COVID-19 is among the most vivid wake-up calls in over a century. It should force us to begin to think in earnest and collectively about living in more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature"

Yes, I think he may be.

I am left to wonder whether, via the Trojan Horse of COVID-19, we have allowed an anti-modernity, anti-industrial primitivist to take over our economy and shut it down in sympathy to how he would like to remake the world as a medieval utopia.

All the things that we might charitably call unintended consequences of the government's fight against COVID-19 -- lockdowns, economic shutdown, reduced long-distance travel -- we must ask whether these outcomes were really unintended by some of our leadership

As a minimum, Fauci should not be making public policy. Public policy is about tradeoffs, in this case between disease transmission rates and production / commerce. A man who seems to put no value on the latter, or even negative value, can't be trusted to make rational tradeoffs